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Category: Fan convention

For this year’s convention I created another villain from the DC Universe – Talon from the Batman franchise. The character itself is a deadly assassin controlled by the secret organization Court of Owls that is embedded in the most hidden corners of the Gotham City.

Below you can see a gallery with few pictures taken during the costume creation process and final product during the cosplay contest. Costume itself is created from different materials. Natural cotton fabric and leather were used to create the dress, cowl and belt.

Artificial materials (fitness mat, moosgumi, worbla) were used to create armor pieces – body armor, arm and leg bracers. Weapons were carved out from the dense Styrofoam like material and painted with few layers of wood glue (to harden and protect the material) before applying the final color to the weapon.

Last week I have attended and helped at the first local Maker Faire event in Ljubljana. This is an event that tries to bring together people or organizations that create things (everything from software and electronics to art and woodwork) in order to promote science, curiosity and knowledge transfer.

In the stands we could meet with the makers from Slovenia and all other neighboring country. Among other things it was apparent that there is a strong motion towards using 3d printers and Arduino platforms as most of the stands showcased a product or idea based on one of them.

The biggest advantage of an event like this for me was a practical aspect of it. There were numerous hands-on activities where you cold try the state-of-the-art equipment, play with different experiments or create your own simple electrical circuit.

Makkon is an annual event (5th this year) that is organised by a society that works in the field of Japanese pop culture. As it is customary on such events we saw a lot of different cosplays from anime and manga, shops that sell various memorabilia, board games, toys, Japanese sweets, tea, etc. There were also multiple side activities such as lectures, origami and leather-work workshop, cosplay contests and Maide cafe.

Loosely translated title of the event that was held in one of the largest convention centres in Slovenia. It was organised by a Slovenian Lego bricks fan club who also made all of the creations presented at the event.

During the event they also organised different competitions like building towers out of 2-by-4 block and Mindstorms competitions.

The event was even bigger than the last year. It spanned two large main convention halls and a dedicated conference room where all of the panels were held. In the first room you could find many different shops with memorabilia, weapons, comics and other sci-fi related items. There were also some celebrities that did the signing and photo sessions with their fans, but that is usually way to expensive unless you are huge fan of theirs. The second room featured artist alley where you could meet your favorite artist and buy cheap prints of high quality and awesome art.

Austrian LEGO society also presented their creations made purely out of LEGO blocks.

501st Legion Austrian Garrison also had their own stand where they showed their creations in connection with Star Wars franchise and did some performances like light saber fights, belly dancers etc.

Some of the cosplays seen at the event:

In parallel to this event, the next hall featured an event called SpieleSpass. The idea of this event was for the people to come there and try as many different board games as they liked. The hall was packed with tables were people, mostly families with kids, played all sorts of board games.

For this year’s edition of our Slovenian sci-fi and fantasy convention Na meji nevidnega I prepared a Scarecrow cosplay that is based on the costume design from Batman Arkham Asylum computer game.

Gauntlet

All the parts of cosplay, from gauntlet to the mask, were designed and hand made by me. The first thigh that I made was the mask. Its base is made in paper mache technique and covered with old fabric that was used as potato bags. The filters for the mask were taken from a spray paint mask and glued to my mask using got glue.

Scarecrow from Arkham Asylum cosplay.

The same fabric was also used to create a hood and skirt. It was torn apart at first and then sew back to get nicer ripped look. Everything else is sewn from a brown cotton fabric. To highlight some feature I added quite large white stitches were two parts of fabric met. There are also some leather straps and hangman’s noose that add to the credibility of the costume.